Primers, tips, the best and the worst

David Skok is one of the key folks helping the industry understand the economics and impact of churn.  This is a thorough primer, including the why, what and how!

So what is Customer Success? You want tips instead?

If you like your education to come in the form of tips, then read Aligning SaaS Customer Success by Joel York. You’ll get tips on onboarding (“onboarding is best when it is done in real-time”),  usage (“if they use it, they will stay”), and customer qualification (“qualify churn like you qualify leads”). Good stuff.

The best churn battle right now? Telco is waaay up there.

To see AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile do battle is pretty amazing. Every few years, there seems to be a new winner and most recently, that seems to be T-Mobile. And they did it but going right after the business model that most people dislike: the two-year contract.  Here’s the key stat: in the U.S., more than 83 million mobile subscribers have no contracts, up from approximately zero three years ago.  That is amazing disruption for such a short period of time.

Successfully layer recurring revenue on retail sales and…

In this stock analysis of Home Depot vs Costco, Costco is seen as a better investment because of its fee revenue (the yearly membership fee that allows you to shop at Costco).  The fee revenue contributes 1.7 billion a year to Costco. “The best news for investors about that growing subscriber fee pool is that it is so predictable. Thanks to a record-high 91% renewal rate, shareholders can count on a huge chunk of Costco’s earnings streaming in like clockwork, whether the economy stays flat, dips, or surges in the years ahead.”

Can a single-product shopping button increase retention?

These Amazon Dash buttons are pretty awesome, or funny, or weird, or silly. You make your call. But if you use Tide or Gatorade, or Kraft Mac & Cheese or one of a few dozen other brands, could this one-click button that reorders that one product work?  James L. McQuive from Forrester calls it “the best bad idea of 2015.” Watch it carefully and learn how “automatable behaviors that could be routinized for consumers, raising their satisfaction while locking preferred brands in place.”

I so so want one of these, but they don’t have one for my favorite beer.